Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan
Feb. 2nd, 2013 04:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Forget the cud. They want blood ...
It began with a cow that just wouldn’t die. It would become an epidemic that transformed Britain’s livestock into sneezing, slavering, flesh-craving four-legged zombies.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the fate of the nation seems to rest on the shoulders: an abattoir worker whose love life is non-existent thanks to the stench of death that clings to him, a teenage vegan suffering from eczema, and an inept journalist.
Can they pool their resources, unlock a cure and save the world?
Three losers. Overwhelming odds. One outcome. Yup, we’re screwed …
Apocalypse Cow was joint winner (together with Half-Sick Of Shadows by David Logan) of the inaugural Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize in 2012.
When a secret government experiment to create a biological warfare agent goes wrong, the British government tries to cover it up by killing the infected subjects (a herd of cows) at a Scottish abattoir. But the plan goes horribly wrong and an infected cow escapes. The government imprisons Terry (the surviving abattoir worker who’s haunted by his job and stinks of meat) and hunts down the missing cow while keeping the story out of the public eye.
However the story can’t be kept under wraps and when Lesley, a failed journalist on a Glasgow paper mistakenly gets a tip on the conspiracy, she sets out to expose what’s happened. Her inept attempts to discover the truth bring her into contact with Terry and Geldof (a ginger Glaswegian teenager living with hippy parents whose hemp clothes give him eczema). As the infection sweeps Britain’s animal population, the trio rapidly realise that the only hope of developing a cure is to get the information overseas despite the overwhelming odds against them …
Michael Logan’s prize-winning zombie horror comedy is SHAUN OF THE DEAD meets BLACK SHEEP but although the plot cracks along at breakneck pace, for me the comedy was too heavy handed and reliant on caricature to be anything more than an okay read.
The characters struggle to rise above stereotypes. Geldof is a scrawny nerd – a maths whizz whose thoughts are consumed by sex and who fancies his next-door neighbour – and his parents are two-dimensional caricatures. Terry’s a sex-starved, guilt-riddled animal killer and Lesley an inept journalist struggling to fill the shoes of her famous war correspondent father. They exist to serve the plot and the way their relationships develop is telegraphed while the main antagonist, Brown, is little more than a standard evil cypher there to push the action forward.
The humour relies largely on violence and sex jokes, which I got bored with after a while. The killer rabbits and killer cows provoked some smiles but it got old quickly and Logan sometimes carries the joke on beyond its natural length (particularly in a scene involving French border officials, which Monty Python did first and better).
Logan does well at keeping the plot and the action running and his portrayal of the breakdown of Britain is well handled.
All in all, although this book didn’t work for me, I’d be interested in checking out Logan’s other work.
The Verdict:
Michael Logan’s prize-winning zombie horror comedy is SHAUN OF THE DEAD meets BLACK SHEEP but although the plot cracks along at breakneck pace, for me the comedy was too heavy handed and reliant on caricature to be anything more than an okay read. That said, the way Logan keeps the plot moving would make me interested in checking out his next work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the free copy of this book.
It began with a cow that just wouldn’t die. It would become an epidemic that transformed Britain’s livestock into sneezing, slavering, flesh-craving four-legged zombies.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the fate of the nation seems to rest on the shoulders: an abattoir worker whose love life is non-existent thanks to the stench of death that clings to him, a teenage vegan suffering from eczema, and an inept journalist.
Can they pool their resources, unlock a cure and save the world?
Three losers. Overwhelming odds. One outcome. Yup, we’re screwed …
Apocalypse Cow was joint winner (together with Half-Sick Of Shadows by David Logan) of the inaugural Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize in 2012.
When a secret government experiment to create a biological warfare agent goes wrong, the British government tries to cover it up by killing the infected subjects (a herd of cows) at a Scottish abattoir. But the plan goes horribly wrong and an infected cow escapes. The government imprisons Terry (the surviving abattoir worker who’s haunted by his job and stinks of meat) and hunts down the missing cow while keeping the story out of the public eye.
However the story can’t be kept under wraps and when Lesley, a failed journalist on a Glasgow paper mistakenly gets a tip on the conspiracy, she sets out to expose what’s happened. Her inept attempts to discover the truth bring her into contact with Terry and Geldof (a ginger Glaswegian teenager living with hippy parents whose hemp clothes give him eczema). As the infection sweeps Britain’s animal population, the trio rapidly realise that the only hope of developing a cure is to get the information overseas despite the overwhelming odds against them …
Michael Logan’s prize-winning zombie horror comedy is SHAUN OF THE DEAD meets BLACK SHEEP but although the plot cracks along at breakneck pace, for me the comedy was too heavy handed and reliant on caricature to be anything more than an okay read.
The characters struggle to rise above stereotypes. Geldof is a scrawny nerd – a maths whizz whose thoughts are consumed by sex and who fancies his next-door neighbour – and his parents are two-dimensional caricatures. Terry’s a sex-starved, guilt-riddled animal killer and Lesley an inept journalist struggling to fill the shoes of her famous war correspondent father. They exist to serve the plot and the way their relationships develop is telegraphed while the main antagonist, Brown, is little more than a standard evil cypher there to push the action forward.
The humour relies largely on violence and sex jokes, which I got bored with after a while. The killer rabbits and killer cows provoked some smiles but it got old quickly and Logan sometimes carries the joke on beyond its natural length (particularly in a scene involving French border officials, which Monty Python did first and better).
Logan does well at keeping the plot and the action running and his portrayal of the breakdown of Britain is well handled.
All in all, although this book didn’t work for me, I’d be interested in checking out Logan’s other work.
The Verdict:
Michael Logan’s prize-winning zombie horror comedy is SHAUN OF THE DEAD meets BLACK SHEEP but although the plot cracks along at breakneck pace, for me the comedy was too heavy handed and reliant on caricature to be anything more than an okay read. That said, the way Logan keeps the plot moving would make me interested in checking out his next work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the free copy of this book.
